Infiltrating the Great Game is not an option. They are too well hidden, and screen their members very carefully. I have to draw them out, break Mieli’s link to them. And they only deal with epic, existential threats.
I need to become one. To manipulate them, I need to find something that makes them afraid. I need leverage. And I already know what that is: the ghost that has been haunting me since the Highway.
I find us a slow-flowing layer not too far from the eyestorms of the South Pole.
‘Keep us in the hot stratosphere beacons,’ I tell Carabas. ‘If you see any mermaids, let me know.’
‘Yes, Master,’ it says in a whirring, high-pitched voice, and takes my place at the pilot’s seat, short booted feet hanging in the air.
I sigh. Evidently, my former self thought his own witty banter was company enough.
I leave the cat to its work and head for the ship’s treasure room, to open the qupt that Mars died for.
The Leblanc is bigger from the inside than from the outside. Physically, it is a marvel, a picotech creation: zoku subatomic engineering, dense pseudomatter and bizarre metastable quark configurations and nucleon soup, impossibly dense but programmable, all whirling around a tiny black hole like those of the Gun Club ships, only smaller. The passenger space is virtual, a network of interconnected Realms. The main meta-Realm is a blue-lit corridor with a moving walkway, lined with humming Buck Rogers machines and Realmgates.
I’ve barely had time to explore them, but this time, I’m only interested in the treasure room. It is a vault in an ancient fantasy castle, full of loot converted into iconic Realm form, potions and weapons and treasure, representing stolen zoku jewels and quantum software. Sobornost tech stored as firmament code on scrolls, exotic gogols as frozen homunculi inside bottles. There is even a green planet, a stolen biosphere, some design from the world-builders of the Belt, with an entire biological history unfolding on its surface. It makes me realise why Joséphine did not allow me to remember the ship: with these resources, I would have been too difficult to control.
But I’m not here to admire the spoils of past crimes. I take out the qupt and look at it. The treasure room – a small Realm to itself – translates it into a scroll, sealed with hard candle wax. I break the seal carefully, and Isidore’s message echoes in my mind again.
Jean! You can’t believe what I found! It’s not just Earth, it’s the Spike, and the Collapse, you have to look at this.
There is an aching weight in my chest when I hear his voice, but I grit my teeth and focus on the task at hand.
The quantum state that came with it floats up from the scroll, countless tiny soap bubbles connected by glowing tendrils. I examine it carefully: it is a delicate thing, a tangle of qubits that does not follow any encoding scheme I have come across. Aboard the Wardrobe, I would have no hope of deciphering it. But here in the Leblanc, I do not lack tools.
The work takes a long time, and I have to uncork some of the mathematics gogols. Eventually, they inform me that it is a small virtual quantum computer, meant to bootstrap itself in a biological brain, perhaps originally transmitted via complex photon states – a node in a vast distributed machine, computing … something.
I imagine what it could have been like for poor Owl Boy: a flash of light in the sky that you look at, and suddenly this thing enters your brain via the optic nerve, infects you, repurposes the microtubules in your neurons to do coherent quantum computations. But what is it for? For making a viral, System-wide zoku?
There is only one way to find out. I sandbox myself and increase the fidelity of my neural network emulation to the maximum. A full molecular-level simulation of even a single human brain swallows a respectable chunk of the ship’s computational capacity. The feeling is strange. At the level of my consciousness, there should be no perceptible difference, but I could swear that my thoughts feel messier, softer, more eager to copulate with each other and form new ideas.
I tell the sandbox to instantiate the contents of Isidore’s qupt in my virtual brain. There is a flash of light in my optic nerve, and then I hear a voice.
You live on an island called causality, it says.
Like Isidore before me, I listen to the Kaminari speak. When it is over, I seal the scroll again. I feel dizzy. By accident, I lean on the green planet, and almost fall down as my hand slides along its slick, cold atmosphere.
The System history speaks of the Spike as a Singularity-class event created by the Kaminari-zoku’s transcendence gone wrong, a destructive echo of a god-birth that the Sobornost tried to contain by starting the Protocol War. Instead, it seems that the event that took out Jupiter was engineered by the Great Game Zoku, an attempt stop the Kaminari’s attempt to break the Planck locks. Spacetime weapons. I bet Barbicane and his cronies had something to do with it.
Cold anger comes with the thought. I’m going to keep my promise. I’m going to take more than just your toys for this. For Mars and the Kaminari both.
I could try to blackmail the Great Game by threatening to expose them. But that can’t be what they are afraid of. The Sobornost would not care, especially not now, and with their sleeper agents in nearly every zoku, in all likelihood the Great Game would be able to strangle any Deep Throat attempts easily.
What the Kaminari did is not enough for the Great Game to destroy Mars. It must be how they did it that they fear. Creating a system-wide viral zoku? How was that supposed to break the locks?
We found the answer in the Collapse, the Kaminari said. We need your help.
The Collapse is another white spot both in my memory and history itself. If the exomemory was still there, I’m sure I could find further evidence for Great Game interference. The consensus version is a sudden, catastrophic collapse of the global quantum markets used to value upload labour and embodied life on old Earth, a world with a population so large that most people could not afford human bodies. A time of chaos and madness, when the ancestors of the zokus and the Oortians and other System civilisations fled a dying world, leaving it to the wildcode and the—
It is as if a white-hot pen wrote the word in my brain. The Aun. They were there. They were the ones who took over after the Collapse. They must know what happened. They will know what the Great Game fears so much they destroyed two worlds to hide it.
I close the treasure room behind me and head for the bookshop vir.
I pass the gate to the main leisure Realm of the ship: the transatlantic liner Provence on a never-ending journey across a sunlit sea, offering the charms of a swimming pool, tennis on the deck, and the delightful company of a Miss Nellie Underdown. I pause in front of it, and listen to the faint echoes of sea birds and the rushing waves. Suddenly, I feel tired after my efforts. Perhaps that is what I need: a few quiet subjective hours in a deck chair with a good book laid over my eyes. The smell of sun and old paper and sweat, a dip in the pool, an evening with a charming young lady, even an imaginary one.
A sudden sharp thought stops me.
What would Perhonen say?
I can hear the Oortian ship’s voice in my head, fluttering like a butterfly’s wing.
I know what you are doing, Jean. You are avoiding the boy. And time is ticking away. I’m not getting any deader, and Mieli is still not free. Stop whining and do what you have to do.
That’s what is missing in the Leblanc, with all its treasures. A voice that only speaks things that are true.